On the cutting edge of technology

DOVER — By his own admission, Robert H. Foster knew little about the news business when he first started working for his father in 1946.

Fresh out of the service, Foster said he had “never carried a paper” and when asked to sell some advertisements to local businesses, he just winged it.

But the current owner and publisher of Foster’s Daily Democrat knew how to make things work. With a mechanical engineering degree, it didn’t take much for him to figure out the presses and other equipment used to put out the daily paper, and more importantly, how to make them work better.

“I was very much at home with that subject,” Foster recalled.

When he first started with the company, the newspaper had a circulation of about 400 — smaller than that of most weekly publications today. Those were the days when a page of stories and advertisements was assembled one piece of cast metal at a time.

The process that the newspaper went through at that time to produce each edition had changed very little from when it was established in 1873. Stories themselves were assembled, letter by letter, imposed in the edge of a piece of brass. These pieces of brass are called matrices.

They all resided in channels of a large flat magazine. Positioned in front of the Linotype machine operator is a keyboard that looks like a typewriter keyboard, but is completely different.

For example, to set type for “Dover,” the operator would hit the key for capital “D.” As a result, the gate at the forward end of channel capital “D” would open, allowing one capital “D” matrix (brass) to fall and assemble on a horizontal bar.

Next, the operator hits the lowercase “o” key on the keyboard and that piece of brass with the “o” on its edge falls on the bar beside the capital “D” and so on until “Dover” is complete.

Two jaws left and right of all this brass squeeze everything together tight — hot molten metal is squeezed into the recesses of the characters and forms a “line of type” — these lines of metal type form the story to be printed.

As the machine produced the letters, the journeyman assembled the type and placed it, like a jigsaw puzzle, along with whatever else was to go on that particular page into a “chase,” or metal frame, that held all the pieces together.

There were three of these machines initially, staffed by operators working furiously to meet production deadlines. One of the first things Foster did was arrange for the paper to buy two more of those machines, as part of an effort to keep up with the growing competition.

Leonard Finder, an exemployee of The Union Leader of Manchester, was at the time trying to break into the area with a paper called the Strafford Star, seeing Dover and Foster’s Daily Democrat as a “soft” target, Foster said.

But he said his people were better at the mechanics of printing. Finder’s paper technically had better presses, but the operators who ran them took awhile to get them properly calibrated while the Foster’s pressmen were doing better than expected.

Foster said he and other workers used to spy on the Star’s presses on Second Street, and remembered seeing evidence of his rival’s problems firsthand.

“We’d look in the basement window, and there was paper all over the room,” he said.

Eventually, Finder and the Star got up to speed, but Foster saw to it that the paper still kept up with the pack and oftengot ahead, eventually contributing to the Star’s demise.

A real boost Foster remembered in particular was the Fairchild Scanagraver the paper acquired in 1949. It consisted of an “electric eye,” coupled with a hot point stylus. The machine allowed a photograph to be scanned by the eye and etched with the stylus onto a plastic printing plate at the same time. This allowed Foster’s to place more photos in the paper compared to the Strafford Star.

The scanner allowed photographs to be reproduced in the paper with what was considered to be astonishing detail, Foster said, more than 40 years before desktop digital photo scanners were available to the general public in electronics stores.

Another coup came in the early 1960s when the paper replaced the old-fashioned flatbed press with a Goss Urbanite rotary press, which at the time was the latest in technology.

There were barely more than 50 in the country then, but over the years that would quickly change.

Today, there are more than 1,500 of those presses turning out thousands of papers across the country, according to Foster’s Production Director Ray Stockton.

Like the flatbed presses of old, the design specifications of the newer presses have changed little since the 1960s. Yes, anupgrade to a new machine in 1995 made for a faster production rate, but three-quarters of the parts in the new machine were identical to the old, Stockton said.

Instead of the old flat-panel printing, the Urbanite uses plate cylinders with arced plates attached to them to print the paper, more resembling the common current image of the massive spinning cylinders and flowing ribbons of newsprint.

And the way the type is set has changed, too. The old-fashioned “hot metal” type of the Linotype machines was replaced in 1952 with “cold type” systems in which text and other elements are printed out and pasted into place on a board, instead of locked onto the chases of old, according to Foster.

After a page is assembled on the board, a large camera takes a picture, transferring an image onto a piece of film that is later developed into a transparency which contains a reverse image of what is to go on the page.

The transparency is then placed over the raw aluminum plate, where hot lights properly etch the plate before it is placed on the plate cylinder of the press.

Today, the only major change in that system has been the assembly of the page on computer, instead of paste-up boards, and printing directly onto the transparencies, eliminating the camera step.

Today, Stockton said the press’s plate cylinders spin at 40,000 revolutions per minute, producing about 20,000 copies of the paper an hour. The presses could produce up to 25,000 copies per hour if necessary, he said.

Despite the advanced press technology the paper uses, other media have crept up on newspapers over the years, not the least of which is the Internet, which exploded onto the scene in the 1990s.

And, once again, Foster’s Daily Democrat was there, trailblazing as usual. Phil Kincade, the newspaper’s director of new media, said Foster’s was getting ready to put together a Web site before anyone even knew what a Web site was.

It first started to happen in 1995 with the dawn of the 1996 presidential primary and campaigns.

As candidates descended upon the Granite State, Kincade said the paper realized that the Internet was the wave of the future.

“Back then, the Web was in its infancy, and there were very few newspapers who were doing anything with the Web,” he said.

In fact, the only thing resembling a Web browser at the time was Mosaic, a predecessor to what is now known as Netscape.

Common Internet terms such as “browser,” “hyperlink,” and “homepage” had yet to be invented.

The Web site was assembled and released to the Internet in August 1995, and Kincade said it was dedicated to the elections.

Local news coverage of the campaigns from the paper was coupled with video clips and other information provided by television station WMUR. There was even a short-lived forum where political figures discussed the elections and the candidates.

At the time, Kincade said he recalled the Concord Monitor putting together its own site, but after the elections, Foster’s was one of the only newspapers that saw merit in what it created.

“After the primary, (the Monitor) shut their site down. We kept (ours) going,” he said.

Today, every good-sized paper in the state has jumped on the bandwagon with their own Web sites, but Kincade takes pride in what he feels is a better product.

“We’ve always tried to stress heavy local coverage,” he said.

In addition, he said, other newspapers make the mistake of only updating their sites once a day, which defeats the purpose of having a form of media that is able to be changed almost instantly when the news changes.

“Our philosophy is, ‘News doesn’t come out once a day,’” he said.

Kincade said the site is updated four times a day to accommodate breaking news.

As an example, the site added information regularly about the tragic weather-related collapse of a building in Lebanon, Maine, that killed a man.

Kincade said the accident happened at 1 p.m., about the time that day’s newspaper was arriving on newsstands.

Without a Web site, Kincade said the paper would have had to wait until the following day’s paper before telling anyonewhat had happened.

“By the time you got that story out, it would have been a full day old,” he said.

So Kincade and the Web site had a bulletin up and available less than two hours after the incident occurred. Several hours later, a full report was online for readers in addition to follow-up coverage the next day.

If there is one thing Foster has prided himself on more than anything, it has been his ability to see to it that his company remains on the cutting edge of technology, and from the presses to cyberspace, Foster’s Daily Democrat has been doing just that.

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